The End of The World: Thinking from Latin America
A series of conversations
Far from economic, political and cultural centers, Latin America has always seen herself as peripheral, a position which at times was equated with dependency and submission, and at times understood as unique and providential: living at the end of the world meant that ties to traditional modes of thinking and creating were looser, weaker, more fragile. Hence an optimistic assessment of the region as one prone to irreverence, subversion and invention, countered and obscured by the persistence of social and economic injustice, and an insidious political discontent. Now that the whole world is at its end, and in many senses in the wake of Latin America, her peculiar way of weathering epochal storms and imagining livable futures come hell or high water looks particularly inspiring. It is with the aim of tapping into this well of intellectual and creative resources that we present a series of conversations featuring a diverse cast of writers, activists, critics, curators, artists and filmmakers operating in/thinking the region and the world.
Feminism and the Decolonization of the Unconscious
Deprogramming the colonial unconscious has been a goal of Latin American thinkers, activists and artists since at least the beginning of the XXth Century. We owe the term, however, to the work of Brazilian psychoanalyst, art and cultural critic, and curator Suely Rolnik, who was close to Tropicalist desbunde in the 60s and collaborated with Félix Guattari in the 80s. Together, they proposed a very peculiar, and situated, understanding of micropolitics, based on an illuminating cartography of desire. Her insights have been reactivated in the transformative activism of the Feminist Tide that currently agitates Latin America. Rolnik and fellow thinkers and activist from Mexico and Argentina will discuss the reach of this decolonial program.
Cecilia Palmeiro received her PhD from Princeton University. She is a professor of contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies and Gender Theory at New York University in Buenos Aires and at National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). She has published the research books Desbunde y felicidad. De la cartonera a Perlongher (2011), Néstor Perlongher. Correspondencia (2016) and the novel Cat Power. La toma de la Tierra (2017). Together with Fernanda Laguna, she is the curator of the live-archive, exhibition and book High on the Tide: Diary of a Feminist Revolution. She is a member of the Ni Una Menos feminist collective.
Suely Rolnik is a Brazilian psychoanalyst, writer, curator and Full professor at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (since 1979), where she founded the Subjectivity Studies Centre, at the Ph.D. Program on Clinical Psychology, guest professor of the Interdisciplinary Master of Theatre and Living Arts at the National University of Colombia (since 2013) and of Independent Studies Program at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona - MacBa (from 2007 to 2014). She authored several books and essays in different languages. Two of her books have been published in English: Archive mania (HatjCantz /Documenta 13, 2011) and Molecular Revolution in Brazil, co-authored with Félix Guattari in 1986 (Semiotext, 2006). Her more recent book (N-1, 2018), Spheres of insurrection. Notes to decolonize unconscious, will be published in the USA in 2021. She is the creator of the Archive for a work-event, on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s oeuvre (65 film interviews).
Sayak Valencia (Tijuana, BC, México, 1980). Doctora en Filosofía, Teoría y Crítica Feminista, con Mención Europea, por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Poeta, ensayista y exhibicionista performática. Profesora Investigadora Titular B en el Departamento de Estudios Culturales del Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Centro de Investigación CONACYT. Miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, Nivel 1. Ha dictado conferencias y seminarios sobre: fronteras, violencia, narcocultura, Capitalismo Gore, transfeminismos, feminismo chicano, feminismo poscolonial, arte y teoría queer en diversas universidades de Europa y el continente americano. Entre sus obras recientes se incluyen: Gore Capitalism (Semiotexte /MIT 2018), Capitalismo Gore (Paidós, 2016 y Melusina, Barcelona, 2010), Adrift´s Book (Aristas Martínez, Badajoz, 2012), El reverso exacto del texto (Centaurea Nigra Ediciones, Madrid 2007), Jueves Fausto (Ediciones de la Esquina / Anortecer, Tijuana 2004), así como una treintena de artículos académicos y capítulos de libros en revistas de España, Alemania, Francia, Polonia, México, Argentina, los Estados Unidos, Colombia, entre otros.
